"But did it resemble any one you had ever seen?"
With a slight droop of his eyelids, he said: "Don't ask foolish
questions, Marmion. Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life. He
wouldn't have lived at all, if a breeze hadn't come up and let us get
away to the coast. It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went
bowling down towards Port Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake.
However, the poor beggar thought he was going to die, and one night he
told me his story. He was an escaped convict from Freemantle, Western
Australia. He had, with others, been taken up to the northern coast to do
some Government work, and had escaped in the dingey. His crime was
stealing funds belonging to a Squatting and Mining Company. There was
this extenuating circumstance: he could have replaced the money, which,
as he said, he'd only intended to use for a few weeks. But a personal
enemy threw suspicion on him, accounts were examined, and though he
showed he'd only used the money while more of his own was on the way to
him, the Company insisted on prosecuting him. For two reasons: because it
was itself in bad odour, and hoped by this trial to divert public
attention from its own dirty position; and because he had against him not
only his personal enemy, but those who wanted to hit the Company through
him.
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